The name Pāṇini is a
patronymic meaning descendant of Paṇina.[18] His full name was Dakṣiputra Pāṇini according to verses 1.75.13 and 3.251.12 of
Patanjali's Mahābhāṣya, with the first part suggesting his mother's name was Dakṣi.[6]
Dating
Nothing definite is known about when Pāṇini lived, not even in which century he lived. Pāṇini has been dated between the seventh[6][19] and fourth century BCE.[20][1][2][3][4][note 1]
George Cardona (1997) in his authoritative survey and review of Pāṇini-related studies, states that the available evidence strongly supports a dating no later than between 400 and 350 BCE, while earlier dating depends on interpretations and is not probative.[21]
Based on
numismatic findings, Von Hinüber (1989) and Falk (1993) place Pāṇini in the mid-4th century BCE.[1][2][3][20] Pāṇini's rupya (A 5.2.119, A 5.2.120, A. 5.4.43, A 4.3.153,) mentions a specific gold coin, the niṣka, in several sutra,[22] which was introduced in India in the 4th-century BCE.[3] According to Houben, "the date of "
c. 350 BCE for Pāṇini is thus based on concrete evidence which till now has not been refuted."[3] According to Bronkhorst, there is no reason to doubt the validity of Von Hinüber's and Falk's argument, setting the terminus post quem[note 4] for the date of Pāṇini at 350 BCE or the decades thereafter.[20] According to Bronkhorst,
...thanks to the work carried out by Hinüber (1990:34-35) and Falk (1993: 303-304), we now know that Pāṇini lived, in all probability, far closer in time to the period of
Aśoka than had hitherto been thought. According to Falk's reasoning, Panini must have lived during the decennia following 350 BCE, that is, just before (or contemporaneously with?) the invasion of Alexander of Macedonia[2]
Cardona mentions two major pieces of internal evidence for the dating of Pāṇini.[23] The occurrence of the word yavanānī in 4.1.49, referring to a writing (
lipi) c.q. cuneiform writing, or to
Greek writing, suggests a date for Pāṇini after the 326 BCE
Indian campaign of Alexander the Great. Cardona rejects this possibility, arguing that yavanānī may also refer to a Yavana woman; and that Indians had contacts with the Greek world before Alexander's conquests.[24][note 6] Sutra 2.1.70 of Pāṇini mentions kumāraśramaṇa, derived from śramaṇa, which refers to a female renunciates, c.q. "
Buddhist nuns", implying that Pāṇini should be placed after
Gautama Buddha. K. B. Pathak (1930) argued that kumāraśramaṇa could also refer to a
Jain nun, meaning that Pāṇini is not necessarily to be placed after the Buddha.[23]
It is not certain whether Pāṇini used writing for the composition of his work, though it is generally agreed that he knew of a form of writing, based on references to words such as lipi ("script") and lipikara ("scribe") in section 3.2 of theAṣṭādhyāyī.[27][28][29] The dating of the
introduction of writing, to present day North West Pakistan, may therefore give further information on the dating of Pāṇini.[note 7]
Pāṇini cites at least ten grammarians and linguists before him: Āpiśali,
Kāśyapa, Gārgya, Gālava, Cākravarmaṇa,
Bhāradvāja, Śākaṭāyana, Śākalya, Senaka, Sphoṭāyana and
Yaska.[36] According to Kamal K. Misra, Pāṇini references Yaska's
Nirukta,[37] "whose writings date back to the middle of the 4th century B.C".[38]
Others, on linguistic style, date his works to the sixth or fifth century BCE, as:
According to Bod, Pāṇini's grammar defines Classical Sanskrit, so Pāṇini is chronologically placed in the later part of the
Vedic period, seventh to fifth century BCE.[16]
According to
A. B. Keith, the Sanskrit text that most matches the language described by Pāṇini is the Aitareya Brāhmaṇa (
c. 8th – 6th BCE).[40]
According to Scharfe, "his proximity to the Vedic language as found in the Upanisads and Vedic sūtras suggests the 5th or maybe 6th c. B.C."[6]
Approximate geographical region of Gandhara centered on the
Peshawar Basin, in present-day northwest
Pakistan
Nothing certain is known about Pāṇini's personal life. In an inscription of Siladitya VII of Valabhi,[who?] he is called Śalāturiya, which means "man from Salatura".[citation needed] This means Panini lived in
Salatura of ancient
Gandhara (present day north-west
Pakistan), which likely was near
Lahor, a town at the junction of Indus and Kabul rivers.[note 8][41][42] According to the memoirs of 7th-century Chinese scholar
Xuanzang, there was a town called Suoluoduluo on the Indus where Pāṇini was born, and he composed the Qingming-lun (Sanskrit: Vyākaraṇa).[41][43][44]
According to Hartmut Scharfe, Pāṇini lived in Gandhara close to the borders of the
Achaemenid Empire, and
Gandhara was then an Achaemenian
satrapy following the
Achaemenid conquest of the Indus Valley. He must, therefore, have been technically a Persian subject but his work shows no awareness of the Persian language.[6][45] According to
Patrick Olivelle, Pāṇini's text and references to him elsewhere suggest that "he was clearly a northerner, probably from the northwestern region".[46]
Legends and later reception
Pāṇini is mentioned in Indian fables and ancient texts. The Panchatantra, for example, mentions that Pāṇini was killed by a lion.[47][48][49]
The most important of Pāṇini's works, the Aṣṭādhyāyī is a grammar that essentially defines the Sanskrit language. Modelled on the dialect and register of elite speakers in his time, the text also accounts for some features of the older
Vedic language.
The Aṣtādhyāyī is a prescriptive and generative grammar with algebraic rules governing every aspect of the language. It is supplemented by three ancillary texts: akṣarasamāmnāya, dhātupāṭha[A] and gaṇapāṭha.[B][54]
Growing out of a centuries-long effort to preserve the language of the Vedic hymns from "corruption", the Aṣtādhyāyī is the high point of a vigorous, sophisticated grammatical tradition devised to arrest language change. The Aṣtādhyāyī's preeminence is underlined by the fact that it eclipsed all similar works that came before: while not the first, it is the oldest such text surviving in its entirety.[55][56][57][58]
The Aṣṭādhyāyī consists of 3,959 sūtras[C] in eight chapters, which are each subdivided into four sections or pādas. The text takes material from lexical lists (dhātupāṭha, gaṇapātha) as input and describes algorithms to be applied to them for the generation of well-formed words. Such is its intricacy that the correct application of its rules and metarules is still being worked out centuries later.[59][60]
The Aṣṭādhyāyī, composed in an era when oral composition and transmission was the norm, is staunchly embedded in that oral tradition. In order to ensure wide dissemination, Pāṇini is said to have preferred brevity over clarity[61] - it can be recited end-to-end in two hours. This has led to the emergence of a great number of commentaries[D] of his work over the centuries, which for the most part adhere to the foundations laid by Pāṇini's work.[55][62]
The learning of Indian curriculum in late classical times had at its heart a system of grammatical study and linguistic analysis.[63] The core text for this study was the Aṣṭādhyāyī of Pāṇini, the sine qua non of learning.[64] This grammar of Pāṇini had been the object of intense study for the ten centuries prior to the composition of the Bhaṭṭikāvya. It was Bhaṭṭi's purpose to provide a study aid to Pāṇini's text by using the examples already provided in the existing grammatical commentaries in the context of the Rāmāyaṇa. The intention of the author was to teach this advanced science through a relatively easy and pleasant medium. In his own words:
This composition is like a lamp to those who perceive the meaning of words and like a hand mirror for a blind man to those without grammar.
This poem, which is to be understood by means of a commentary, is a joy to those sufficiently learned: through my fondness for the scholar I have here slighted the dullard.
Pāṇini's analysis of
noun compounds still forms the basis of modern linguistic theories of compounding in
Indian languages. Pāṇini's comprehensive and
scientific theory of grammar is conventionally taken to mark the start of
Classical Sanskrit.[71] His systematic treatise inspired and made Sanskrit the preeminent Indian language of learning and literature for two millennia.
Pāṇini's theory of
morphological analysis was more advanced than any equivalent Western theory before the 20th century.[72] His treatise is generative and descriptive, uses
metalanguage and
meta-rules, and has been compared to the
Turing machine wherein the logical structure of any computing device has been reduced to its essentials using an idealized
mathematical model.[73]
Pāṇini's work became known in 19th-century Europe, where it influenced modern linguistics initially through
Franz Bopp, who mainly looked at Pāṇini. Subsequently, a wider body of work influenced Sanskrit scholars such as
Ferdinand de Saussure,
Leonard Bloomfield, and
Roman Jakobson.
Frits Staal (1930–2012) discussed the impact of Indian ideas on language in Europe. After outlining the various aspects of the contact, Staal notes that the idea of formal rules in language – proposed by
Ferdinand de Saussure in 1894 and developed by
Noam Chomsky in 1957 – has origins in the European exposure to the formal rules of Pāṇinian grammar.[74] In particular, de Saussure, who lectured on Sanskrit for three decades, may have been influenced by Pāṇini and
Bhartrihari; his idea of the unity of signifier-signified in the
sign somewhat resembles the notion of
Sphoṭa. More importantly, the very idea that formal rules can be applied to areas outside of logic or mathematics may itself have been catalysed by Europe's contact with the work of Sanskrit grammarians.[74]
De Saussure
Pāṇini, and the later Indian linguist
Bhartrihari, had a significant influence on many of the foundational ideas proposed by
Ferdinand de Saussure, professor of
Sanskrit, who is widely considered the father of modern
structural linguistics and with
Charles S. Peirce on the other side, to
semiotics, although the concept Saussure used was
semiology. Saussure himself cited Indian
grammar as an influence on some of his ideas. In his Mémoire sur le système primitif des voyelles dans les langues indo-européennes (Memoir on the Original System of Vowels in the Indo-European Languages) published in 1879, he mentions Indian grammar as an influence on his idea that "reduplicated
aorists represent imperfects of a verbal class." In his De l'emploi du génitif absolu en sanscrit (On the Use of the
Genitive Absolute in Sanskrit) published in 1881, he specifically mentions Pāṇini as an influence on the work.[75]
Prem Singh, in his foreword to the reprint edition of the German translation of Pāṇini's Grammar in 1998, concluded that the "effect Panini's work had on Indo-European linguistics shows itself in various studies" and that a "number of seminal works come to mind," including Saussure's works and the analysis that "gave rise to the
laryngeal theory," further stating: "This type of structural analysis suggests influence from Panini's analytical teaching."
George Cardona, however, warns against overestimating the influence of Pāṇini on modern linguistics: "Although Saussure also refers to predecessors who had taken this Paninian rule into account, it is reasonable to conclude that he had a direct acquaintance with Panini's work. As far as I am able to discern upon rereading Saussure's Mémoire, however, it shows no direct influence of Paninian grammar. Indeed, on occasion, Saussure follows a path that is contrary to Paninian procedure."[75][76]
Leonard Bloomfield
The founding father of American structuralism,
Leonard Bloomfield, wrote a 1927 paper titled "On some rules of Pāṇini".[77]
Rishi Rajpopat
Rishi Rajpopat elaborated in 2021 in his PhD thesis[78] a deeper understanding of Panini's "language machine" by designing a simple system of resolving rule conflicts.[79][80] His thesis has been critiqued as being built upon flawed premises and understanding of rules by prominent Indian Sanskrit scholars.[81]
Comparison with modern formal systems
Pāṇini's grammar is the world's first
formal system, developed well before the 19th century innovations of
Gottlob Frege and the subsequent development of mathematical logic. In designing his grammar, Pāṇini used the method of "auxiliary symbols", in which new affixes are designated to mark syntactic categories and the control of grammatical derivations.[clarification needed] This technique, rediscovered by the logician
Emil Post, became a standard method in the design of
computer programming languages.[82][83] Sanskritists now accept that Pāṇini's linguistic apparatus is well-described as an "applied" Post system. Considerable evidence shows ancient mastery of
context-sensitive grammars, and a general ability to solve many complex problems.
Frits Staal has written that "Panini is the Indian
Euclid."[citation needed]
Other works
Two literary works are attributed to Pāṇini, though they are now lost.
Jāmbavati Vijaya is a lost work cited by
Rajashekhara in Jalhana's Sukti Muktāvalī. A fragment is to be found in Ramayukta's commentary on Namalinganushasana. From the title it may be inferred that the work dealt with Krishna's winning of Jambavati in the underworld as his bride. Rajashekhara in Jahlana's Sukti Muktāvalī:
नमः पाणिनये तस्मै यस्मादाविर भूदिह।
आदौ व्याकरणं काव्यमनु जाम्बवतीजयम्॥
namaḥ pāṇinaye tasmai yasmādāvirabhūdiha।
ādau vyākaraṇaṃ kāvyamanu jāmbavatījayam॥
Ascribed to Pāṇini, Pātāla Vijaya is a lost work cited by Namisadhu in his commentary on Kavyalankara of
Rudrata.
There are many mathematical works related to Pāṇini's works. Pāṇini came up with a plethora of ideas to organize the known grammatical forms of his day in a systematic way. Like any mathematician who models a known phenomenon in mathematical language, Pāṇini created a metalanguage and it is very close to the modern-day ideas of algebra. See "
Mathematical Structures of Panini's Ashtaadhyayi" by Bhaskar Kompella.
Johannes Bronkhorst (2019): "Pāṇini's Aṣṭādhyāyī has been the target of much guesswork as to its date. Only recently have more serious proposals been made. Oskar von Hinüber (1990: 34) arrives, on the basis of a comparison of Pāṇini's text with
numismatic findings, at a date that can hardly be much earlier than 350 BCE; Harry Falk (1993: 304; 1994: 327 n. 45) refines these reflections and moves the date forward to the decennia following 350 BCE. If Hinüber and Falk are right, and there seems no reason to doubt this, we have here for Pāṇini a terminus post quem.[20]
Vincenzo Vergiani (2017): "For a survey of scholarship about Panini's date see George Cardona, Panini: A Survey of Research (Delhi: Motilall Banarsidass, 1980), p.260-262. Oskar von Hinüber, Der Beginn der Schrift und fruhe Schriftlichkeit in Indien (Wiesbaden: Steiner Verlag, 1989), p.34 presents evidence that suggests dating Panini to the 4th century."[1]
Johannes Bronkhorst (2016)"...thanks to the work carried out by Hinüber (1990:34-35) and Falk (1993: 303-304), we now know that Pāṇini lived, in all probability, far closer in time to the period of Asoka than had hitherto been thought. According to Falk's reasoning, Panini must have lived during the decennia following 350 BCE, i.e. just before (or contemporaneously with?) the invasion of Alexander of Macedonia."[2]
Jan E.M Houben (2009): "Pāṇini's rupya (A 5.2.120) refers to a type of coin which appeared in the Indian subcontinent only from the 4th century B.C.E. onwards: cf. von Hinüber 1989: p.34 and Falk 1993: 304. The date of "ca. 350 B.C.E. for Pāṇini is thus based on concrete evidence which till now has not been refuted."[3]
Kamal K. Misra (2000): "But Pāṇini himself has acknowledged at least ten great Indian grammatrians before him, and one of them was
Yaska, whose writings date back to the middle of the 4th century B.C."[38]
Cardona: "The evidence for dating Panini, Katyayana and Patanjali is not absolutely probative and depends on interpretation. However, I think there is one certainty, namely that the evidence available hardly allows one to date Panini later than the early to mid fourth century B. C."[4]
Harry Falk (1993), Schrift im alten Indien: ein Forschungsbericht mit Anmerkungen, Gunter Narr Verlag
Frits Staal (1996): "the Sanskrit grammar of Panini (6th or 5th century b.c.e.)"[5]
Hartmut Scharfe (1977): "Panini's date can be fixed only approximately; he must be older than Katyayana (c. 250 B.C.) who in his comments on Panini's work refers to other [stni] earlier scholars dealing with Panini's grammar; his proximity to the Vedic language as found in the Upanisads and Vedic sutra's suggests the 5th or maybe 6th c. B.C."[6] Scharfe refers to: "F. Kielhoek, GGN 1885.186f.; B. Liebich, BB 10.205-234; 11.273-315 and his book, Panini (Leipzig, 1891), p. 38-50; 0. Wecker, BB 30. 1-61+177-207; P. Thieme, Panini and the Veda (Allahabad, 1935), p. 75-81."[6]
Encyclopedia Britannica: "Ashtadhyayi, Sanskrit Aṣṭādhyāyī ("Eight Chapters"), Sanskrit treatise on grammar written in the 6th to 5th century BCE by the Indian grammarian Panini."
7th to 5th century BCE date
Rens Bod (2013): "All we know is that he was born in Ghandara, in former India (currently Afghanistan), and that it must have been between the seventh and fifth centuries BCE."[19] Bod refers to "S. Shukla, 'Panini', Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics, 2nd edition, Elsevier, 2006. See also Paul Kiparsky, 'Paninian Linguistics', Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, 1st edition, Elsevier, 1993."[86]
^According to George Cardonna, the tradition believes that Pāṇini came from Salatura in northwest part of the Indian subcontinent.[4] This is likely to be ancient
Gandhara.[7]
^In 1862
Max Müller argued that yavana may have meant "Greek"[note 5] during Pāṇinis time, but may also refer to Semitic or dark-skinned Indian people.[25][26]
^Pāṇini's use of the term lipi has been a source of scholarly disagreements. Harry Falk in his 1993 overview states that ancient Indians neither knew nor used writing script, and Pāṇini's mention is likely a reference to Semitic and Greek scripts.[30] In his 1995 review, Salomon questions Falk's arguments and writes it is "speculative at best and hardly constitutes firm grounds for a late date for
Kharoṣṭhī. The stronger argument for this position is that we have no specimen of the script before the time of Aśoka, nor any direct evidence of intermediate stages in its development; but of course this does not mean that such earlier forms did not exist, only that, if they did exist, they have not survived, presumably because they were not employed for monumental purposes before Aśoka".[31] According to Hartmut Scharfe, Lipi of Pāṇini may be borrowed from the Old Persian Dipi, in turn derived from Sumerian Dup. Scharfe adds that the best evidence, at the time of his review, is that no script was used in India, aside from the Northwest Indian subcontinent, before around 300 BCE because Indian tradition "at every occasion stresses the orality of the cultural and literary heritage."[32] Kenneth Norman states writing scripts in ancient India evolved over the long period of time like other cultures, that it is unlikely that ancient Indians developed a single complete writing system at one and the same time in the Maurya era. It is even less likely, states Norman, that a writing script was invented during Ashoka's rule, starting from nothing, for the specific purpose of writing his inscriptions and then it was understood all over South Asia where the Aśoka pillars are found.[33] Jack Goody states that ancient India likely had a "very old culture of writing" along with its oral tradition of composing and transmitting knowledge, because the Vedic literature is too vast, consistent and complex to have been entirely created, memorized, accurately preserved and spread without a written system.[34] Falk disagrees with Goody, and suggests that it is a Western presumption and inability to imagine that remarkably early scientific achievements such as Pāṇini's grammar (5th to 4th century BCE), and the creation, preservation and wide distribution of the large corpus of the Brahmanic Vedic literature and the Buddhist canonical literature, without any writing scripts. Johannes Bronkhorst disagrees with Falk, and states, "Falk goes too far. It is fair to expect that we believe that Vedic memorisation — though without parallel in any other human society — has been able to preserve very long texts for many centuries without losing a syllable. (...) However, the oral composition of a work as complex as Pāṇini's grammar is not only without parallel in other human cultures, it is without parallel in India itself. (...) It just will not do to state that our difficulty in conceiving any such thing is our problem".[35]
^Pāṇini; Boehtlingk, Otto von (1886). Panini's Grammatik, herausgegeben, übersetzt, erläutert… von O. Böhtlingk. Sansk. and Germ.
OCLC562865694.
^Henry), Robins, R. H. (Robert (1997). A short history of linguistics (4th ed.). London: Longman.
ISBN0582249945.
OCLC35178602.{{
cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (
link)
^Juhyung Rhi (2009). "On the Peripheries of Civilizations: The Evolution of a Visual Tradition in Gandhāra". Journal of Central Eurasian Studies. 1: 5, 1–13.
^Falk, Harry (1993). Schrift im alten Indien: ein Forschungsbericht mit Anmerkungen (in German). Gunter Narr Verlag. pp. 109–167.
^Salomon, Richard (1995). "Review: On the Origin of the Early Indian Scripts". Journal of the American Oriental Society. 115 (2): 271–278.
doi:
10.2307/604670.
JSTOR604670.
^Scharfe, Hartmut (2002), Education in Ancient India, Handbook of Oriental Studies, Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, pp. 10–12
^[A History of Ancient and Early Medieval India: From the Stone Age to the 12th Century, Upinder Singh, Pearson Education India, 2008 p. 258]
^Keith, Arthur Berriedale (1998). Rigveda Brahmanas: the Aitareya and Kauṣītaki Brāhmaṇas of the Rigveda. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass.
ISBN978-8120813595.
OCLC611413511.
^Mishra, Giridhar (1981).
"प्रस्तावना" [Introduction]. अध्यात्मरामायणेऽपाणिनीयप्रयोगाणां विमर्शः [Deliberation on non-Paninian usages in the Adhyatma Ramayana] (in Sanskrit). Varanasi, India: Sampurnanand Sanskrit University. Retrieved 21 May 2013.
^Lal, Shyam Bihari (2004). "Yavanas in the Ancient Indian Inscriptions". Proceedings of the Indian History Congress. 65: 1115–1120.
ISSN2249-1937.
JSTOR44144820.
^George Cardona (1997). Pāṇini: a survey of research. The verse reads siṃho vyākaraṇasya kartur aharat prāṇān priyān pāṇineḥ "a lion took the dear life of Panini, author of the grammatical treatise". The context is a list of scholars killed by animals, siṃho vyākaraṇasya kartur aharat prāṇān priyān pāṇineḥ / mīmāṃsākṛtam unmamātha sahasā hastī muniṃ jaiminim // chandojnānanidhim jaghāna makaro velātaṭe piṅgalam / ajñānāvṛtacetasām atiruṣāṃ ko'rthas tiraścām guṇaiḥ // Translation: "A lion killed Pāṇini; an elephant madly crushed the sage Jaimini, Mimamsa's author; Pingala, treasury of knowledge of poetic meter, was killed by a crocodile at the water's edge. What do senseless beasts, overcome with fury, care for intellectual virtues?" (Pañcatantra II.28, sometimes ascribed to Vallabhadeva)
^Filliozat. 2002 The Sanskrit Language: An Overview – History and Structure, Linguistic and Philosophical Representations, Uses and Users. Indica Books.
Bhate, S. and Kak, S. (1993) Panini and Computer Science. Annals of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, vol. 72, pp. 79–94.
Bod, Rens (2013), A New History of the Humanities: The Search for Principles and Patterns from Antiquity to the Present, Oxford University Press,
ISBN978-0-19-966521-1
The Aṣṭādhyāyī of Pāṇini, with the Mahābhāṣya and Kāśikā commentaries, along with the Nyāsa and Padamanjara commentaries on the Kāśikā. (PDF) Sanskrit.